‘How are you, how are you, how are you?’
‘Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!’
‘How are you, how are you, how are you?’
‘Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!’
The yoga that followed the cheerfulness exercise was simple, as Heavenly had predicted. They all stretched over to the side in one direction, then over to the other, arms above their heads, so the circle appeared to wave like moss in an ocean current, with only the odd interruption such as ‘Left, left, I said left!’ from Heavenly, which would be followed by an explosion of giggling as the errant bender changed course.
It was certainly far from the torturous yoga sessions at home. At those she’d always felt like it was a competition to feel the most pain and hold the most difficult poses for the longest time. And it was a competition for which she was hardly able. Her shoulder, damaged from years as an eager but accident-prone tennis player and often painful, meant she felt awkward in many of the stretches, but too embarrassed not to attempt them. It was a struggle to feel enthusiastic about that sort of yoga, and she was always relieved when it finished, desperate to arrive at the boring relaxation bits so she could stop twisting her battered body and just lie still on the ground.
But in the rising sun on Chowpatty Beach, the movements flowed like the shallow waves on the edge of the sand, with them all going at their own levels. An elderly woman directly opposite Annie in the circle was bending hardly at all, while a younger woman (although not much younger) halfway between them could place her hands flat on the beach between her ramrod-straight legs.
Both looked utterly radiant. Now the sun had hit the sand, everyone was golden, their shadows long and elegant.
It was so hot that Annie was sweating, but it felt good.
Every time she made eye contact with anyone in the circle, she was rewarded with a welcoming grin. She’d been surprised to see men there, but they were just as friendly (and as mysteriously ageless) as the women.
‘OK, now we are ready to laugh,’ Heavenly eventually announced, to a further round of clapping.
‘First we do the welcome laugh. Join hands at the front, like you are saying a prayer. Now nod your head and laugh.’
The whole group did just that and, although she felt ridiculous, Annie followed suit. It wasn’t real laughter. It was forced, but as she kept doing it, it became less and less so.
‘Eye contact, people,’ Heavenly said. ‘Do not forget eye contact. This is a big part of laughing yoga — looking at each other and laughing with each other. It is a group exercise, otherwise you may as well stay at home and laugh in the mirror.
‘Now we do the laugh to complaining people. Point one finger and shake it, like you cannot believe someone would be complaining to you when we all know there is absolutely nothing to complain about.’
Annie wiggled her finger and laughed, catching the eyes of Kamalijit and Shruti, and the stiff elderly woman across the circle, followed by the bendy younger woman.
‘Now, the Mumbai laugh,’ cackled Heavenly. ‘Close your mouth, stretch it wide, and laugh out your nose! This is how we do it in Mumbai!’
The circle rumbled with laughter, each person jiggling on the spot as they reeled around engaging with those beside and across from them.
‘Now, Chinese/Japanese laughter. Close your eyes! Yes, screw them up! He he he! He he he!’
By Chinese/Japanese laughter, Annie was laughing for real. She looked at Kamalijit on her left and the two of them cracked up, then she looked across the circle at one of the men, who only had two teeth, both of them gold, and who looked to be having the laugh of his life.
‘Laughter of apology,’ instructed Heavenly. ‘This is for when you realise that person you spoke to earlier really did have a reason to complain.’
Heavenly crossed her right arm over to pull on her left earlobe, then her left arm over to pull on her right.
Annie was laughing so much by now she had wet patches under her eyes, whether from the sun or tears of mirth she couldn’t be sure. For the next few minutes, the whole circle shook with laughter. Heavenly moved clockwise around the inside again, laughing into the face of everyone there as they tugged on their earlobes, stopping again in front of Annie.
There she stayed, looking straight into Annie’s light brown eyes with her dancing dark ones, as though she could see straight into her darkest thoughts.
Heavenly let go of her earlobes, and took both Annie’s hands away from hers.
‘Laughter,’ she said. ‘That is all you need, Mrs Hugh Jordan. A little more laughter.’
Had anyone called her ‘Mrs Hugh Jordan’ at home it would most certainly not have been a laughing matter, but here it didn’t seem to offend her at all. Besides, Heavenly just wasn’t the offending type.
Kamalijit and Shruti were clamouring behind Heavenly to high-five her, as was Priyanka, the woman in pink who’d first beckoned her to join, while the rest of the women in the group high-fived each other.
‘You vill come back,’ the little old stiff woman said with a crooked smile.
‘If I can,’ Annie said.
‘Is not a question,’ said the little old woman.
The laughing school turned as one then to face the sun, and Heavenly led them in a brisk round of oms followed by a song in Hindi.
Annie stood among them, the same sun on her face, the extra warmth of an arm slung casually around her shoulder. It was the best she had felt in a long, long time.
After the prayer, the laughing school drifted back into the shade of the trees opposite Wilson College, Heavenly’s students buzzing around her like bees around their queen.
‘You will find us here every morning,’ Heavenly said over their heads as Annie turned towards Pinto’s taxi. ‘We will see you again.’
‘This is all right for you, this laughing yoga?’ Pinto asked when she climbed into the back seat.
‘Pinto, it was more than all right. It was completely wonderful. Did you watch?’
‘Some small bit, ma’am,’ he answered, pulling out into the traffic, which was building up now it was getting closer to rush hour.
‘And what did you think?’
‘I do not know, ma’am,’ he answered, diplomatically.
‘Not your cup of tea? Do you have that expression?’
‘Yes, we do, ma’am, only we do not say so much like that.’
‘What do you say?’
‘Ma’am, we say, “It is my cup of tea, just not right now.”’
THE TAXI RIDE BACK TO THE HOTEL went some way to undoing the good of the laughing yoga even though Pinto was a considerate driver. (It wasn’t him Annie was worried about; it was the other two million people on the road.) Only at one point did he lose his cool, and even then all he did was take both hands off the wheel to join them in prayer, then bow his head until it touched the steering wheel.
‘Oh, please, no — no madam driver,’ he prayed. ‘Sorry, ma’am, but madam drivers in Mumbai is very bad. Look at her! She is not knowing where she is going and she is not going there very slow.’
The female driver in front was not doing her gender any favours with her erratic behaviour, Annie had to admit, but then she could not bear to look for very long. She spent as much of the trip home as she could with her eyes tightly closed.
When Pinto dropped her back at the hotel she realised she had never asked him what the fare would be.
‘So, what do I owe you?’ she asked.
‘Ma’am, I am very shy about money,’ Pinto replied, refusing to meet her gaze in the mirror.
That was not what she was expecting. ‘Oh, but you have to tell me what you want or I might not give you enough,’ she said. Or too much, she thought.
‘I cannot do this, ma’am.’
‘Well, how will I know?’
‘If you like my job, then you decide and also then you maybe come in my taxi again.’
Now their eyes met. If it was some sort of trick, she couldn’t say she minded. She thou
ght she’d given the half-dead taxi driver five hundred rupees the day before to go nowhere, which had been silly of her, and she’d felt bad about it, but she’d thought that was about what the return trip would have cost had she gone through with it. So, working on that premise but worrying about the cost of a single glass of wine in the hotel bar …
‘Here’s a thousand,’ she said. ‘And if you’re here at the same time tomorrow morning, we can do it all again.’
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ Pinto said, taking the notes she offered, nodding and looking at the handbrake.
‘Is that enough, Pinto? Are you happy?’
‘Yes, ma’am. I am happy.’
She very much suspected that a person who could not admit to something he didn’t like not being his cup of tea, would similarly find it hard to confess to unhappiness.
But she would know tomorrow if she had done the right thing.
Chapter Nine
The residue of Heavenly Hirani’s laughing yoga clung to Annie all day. She could barely keep the smile off her face.
Even checking her emails in the hotel business centre to find just a short Awesome. Talk soon from Ben, and nothing from Daisy, failed to dampen her mood.
Rhona had emailed a hurried hello and complaint about her youngest one, Caleb, pulling out the last of his baby teeth courtesy of a doorknob and a piece of string, as seen on YouTube.
In real life, Rhona reported, there was much more blood involved.
Annie had always had a soft spot for Caleb, even though in many ways he was the devil’s own child, constantly in trouble with Rhona, other parents, his teachers, the neighbours … The list went on.
He was an eight-year-old who was blessed with choirboy good looks — golden curls, a smattering of freckles, enormous blue eyes — but who could not keep his hands to himself or the rest of his body out of trouble. He seemed to be able to break fragile ornaments just by looking at them, had already had his stomach pumped three times after eating or drinking different poisons, had broken his arm falling out of a tree outside the local police station, fractured his leg hiding under Rhona’s sister’s car just before she started it up, been concussed twice on the football field even though he didn’t actually play the sport, and had earned five stitches in his head after running into the refrigerator door at Annie’s own house when he was tormenting Bertie one day.
Still, Bertie had loved him, as did Annie. He was a child full of mischief but without a nasty bone in his battered body. He’d told Annie once that she could be his mother if Rhona went to Heaven.
She knew that the special bond she had with the little horror helped keep his mother from strangling him when he tested her patience and that of Joe, Emma and Molly, who at fourteen, sixteen and eighteen were a close-knit group of which Caleb would never be part.
Annie was in awe of Rhona. Her friend had barely cracked once since her husband, Aidan, moved out, turning all her energy into making sure that the children, especially the older ones, emerged as unscathed as possible. (Caleb, Rhona said, was always going to be scathed, so she just needed to keep him out of hospital and herself out of the lunatic asylum until he was legal.)
Annie sent her friend an upbeat reply, saying she’d finally ventured out into the wilds of Mumbai and had returned in one piece. Then, instead of retreating to her room or the pool, she ventured into the hotel’s main restaurant, a vast corner space with a busy buffet in the middle.
‘What room, please?’ a pretty young hostess asked her at the door. ‘Oh, you must be Mrs Hugh Jordan,’ she said when Annie told her. ‘Your husband was telling us about you. Welcome to the Taj Lands End. Did you arrive today?’
Annie fudged the answer to that and asked if she could be seated in a corner, by the window, so she didn’t feel so conspicuous on her own.
‘Shall I bring you a newspaper?’ the hostess suggested. ‘If you do not want to read the news you can just pretend.’
Annie sat with her back to the rest of the room, her view out over the neighbouring rooftops and onto the boulevard beside the Bandra sea front, or sea face as Pinto called it.
She couldn’t remember eating alone in a restaurant ever before, although she thought she must have, surely, before Hugh.
Before Hugh.
She could barely remember that time. They’d met at university, after all. In the cafeteria, sitting across from each other, looking at trays of identical food, all of it only just this side of edible. They’d joked about how the chocolate milk was the one thing that kept them going and it had neither chocolate in it nor, most likely, milk.
She hadn’t noticed him on campus before then — he was an engineering major and she was English Lit — but once she did notice him she was sort of surprised he hadn’t crossed her radar before. He didn’t wear trendy clothes, or have a fashionable haircut, or stick out particularly, except that he was very handsome, in an even-featured something-more-than-pleasant way.
It was his good fortune that Annie had just broken up with Carl Fenning, another good-looking guy who did wear trendy clothes and have a fashionable haircut and who did stick out — a little too much for Annie’s liking. Her recent ex had been gregarious, charming — a real livewire — but had all the makings of being a hard dog to keep on the porch. And, although Annie had been very fond of Carl, she had felt exhausted after one night with him — a lifetime was not on the cards.
‘He’s your fun one, darling,’ her mother had said. ‘You’ll know when you meet the real one.’
Eleanor had married her fun one, and he had exhausted her, although she stuck with him until his demise from lung cancer not long before Annie met Hugh.
Annie loved her father, but he was a man who was easily distracted, so, when she thought of her childhood, it was always her mother who swam into view. The two of them had been happily joined at the hip and could operate efficiently quite separately from Annie’s father. Not that they bore him any ill will, it was just that sometimes, even Eleanor admitted, he seemed somewhat surplus to requirements.
Eleanor had met her ‘real one’ after she married Tony, she once confessed, and what’s more she’d known it straight away. But she had taken her wedding vows seriously; and the real one waited for her, just not for long enough.
Right from the tiny toe plunge as she took her first sip of chocolate milk looking at Hugh across the cafeteria table, Annie had suspected Hugh was the real one. He was a man when her world at that point still seemed full of boys.
He told her after their first date that she was something special and that he saw them being together forever. At the time, she thought he was a silver-tongued Romeo and was charmed, but in fact he wasn’t a flirt by nature at all. He was a man of few words (fewer and fewer as the years went by, as she was to discover) but he called things as he saw them, and right from the get-go he saw them, he saw her.
This dog was not leaving the porch unless she left with him. She had no doubt about that whatsoever. Loyalty was one of Hugh’s great strengths; she had lost track, she thought, sitting in the Taj Lands End breakfast room, of the others. He was a good provider. And a good father. But after twenty-five years of marriage was that enough?
The fact that she knew he would stay faithful to her should have made her feel better than it did.
Annie picked up the newspaper, the Hindustan Times, and skimmed the front page. The hostess was right to suspect there was not much in it of interest to her, and she got Pinto’s joke now about the bribery and corruption: the paper was full of it. Sports players were charged with fixing matches, politicians with fixing their friends up with jobs, even Bollywood stars were being tarred with the bribery brush.
Every other story seemed to be a family feud that had ended with one less member of the family.
It wasn’t exactly entertainment, although she did have to laugh at a story about a very successful bakery. This included mouth-watering descriptions of the delicacy for which it was famous, a sort of baklava, and even a recipe, plus detailed i
nstructions on how to find the place. A rider in italics at the end of the story, however, said that at the time of going to press the hard-to-find bakery had closed down over a tenancy disagreement and was unlikely to ever open again.
She was also riveted by the taunting tone of the comments in the showbiz pages. Will she get it right this time? one caption asked of a beautiful model-turned-actress wearing a floral pantsuit. Or will she continue to look like a dog’s breakfast?
Annie hardly wanted to keep reading, but she felt less obvious looking at something than just sitting there on her own waiting for a menu. When the children were little she’d rarely ventured out alone; she didn’t think many mothers did. She always had the babies, and any time she got to herself she quickly found a purpose for at home: tidying up the linen press, organising the cluttered kitchen cupboards, re-upholstering a footstool, decorating the children’s schoolbooks.
As they grew older she might have left the house more often, but it was usually to take them somewhere or pick them up from somewhere else, or run errands on their behalf. Ben had been sports-mad from a very young age, and Daisy had been in every after-school club, choir and theatre group imaginable. There was a seemingly endless list of things she needed Annie to get for her, and Annie never said no. She loved being a full-time mother, had never regretted a single moment, a single mile.
And if she’d ever had the time or inclination to go to a restaurant it would have been with her mother, or Rhona or another mum from the PTA, or — just someone. She didn’t think she was that unusual in this regard — she doubted many women felt comfortable eating alone, even businesswomen. Just to prove her wrong, a woman in a dark suit bustled in and sat at the table next to her, briskly ordering from a passing waiter and pulling an iPad out of her handbag. She looked completely comfortable, but then in her corporate uniform she was clearly identified as someone for whom eating alone at a restaurant was a requirement of the job. No one would pity this woman, the same as they would not pity a man, or judge her. Not that Annie was worried about being pitied or judged, particularly. But she was obviously worried about something, because she felt supremely uncomfortable, even with the newspaper.
Heavenly Hirani's School of Laughing Yoga Page 7
